OSG-39 - The Meklar Revolt

[RefSteel]

Picking this up again in between turns in the "real" (B) game....

I played 20 turns past the posted save, wrote most of a report, then put this aside for 39B, and ended up rewriting the report completely so the story would better reflect the way haphazard introduced that game!  So here's the start of the new report, which I'll post in installments as time permits, as though they were turnsets in an SG ... even though I'm just passing the save on to myself at the end of each set!

First Report from Beyond:  2348-2360

Always the same dream:  Meklon, but with wildly different industry, and strange worlds with numbered names - a sense, if I'm remembering, trying and failing to grasp the substance of the dream, that everything was changing, Meklon itself and a jungle colony called Humidity 090, plus another world that I remember only as Endoria, deep in a nebula, but almost the twin of Meklon itself, each transforming with dream-like fluidity into a gigantic spaceyard, each building the parts for superships, larger than any true ship I've ever seen.  Dreaming, I seemed to pass through space, from world to world, coming last to the cold steppes of Primodius45, with cruisers looming too-large in its skies, clawing at the planet from overhead:  Four Hydra heavy beamers escorting an equal number of Sakkra colony ships.




Down below, on the blasted surface, dwindling numbers of factories had started stamping out new Meklar as though they were toy soldiers, each assembled by other Meklar to rise from the factory bed and going to work assembling more - though still too few, never, ever enough to face the threat from overhead.  I vaguely remember a starfleet, tiny to insignificance, far off at Endoria, dividing into four:  One fighter setting out toward embattled P45, one toward the red star of Moro with its threatening, hostile world, a single scout returning to Meklon, seeming to cry as it fled home, while eight remained oblivious, circling Endoria, circling.




Again the dream, a day apart, or a year?  Four Hydra heads spit fire down upon the people of Primodius45, heavy laser beams carving factories into abstract art, reminding me uncomfortably of something I can't put a name to, perhaps from my childhood or a collective memory absorbed through the interstellar feed.  The art crumbles, and five factories are gone amid metallic screams, a million Meklar people melting under the fiery beams while the survivors keep stamping out more from the factories - more Meklar to rise and to die.  I see the transports looming nearer, weirdly distorted, rising up out of Maalor, my dream-eyes piercing the lightyears as though they were mere kilometers away - and then closer, more clearly still:  I could see them as if through windows in their transport craft, thirty-five million Sakkra lizards swarming, crawling over each other in their eagerness to get to the front, to kill and conquer.  Our ships leaving Endoria by contrast barely seem to move, as though the nebula were a monster with a thousand purple hands, holding them back, holding them in.  Unable to move, unable to scream, I escaped only by waking, shivering.




The first thing I see is the new Sakkra fleet:  Two more Hydra cruisers, oppressive, impossible to fight, bearing down from a new angle - and then in the nature of dreaming, they are there already above our world ... but vaguely, I remember:  There were four!  Then the dream comes into focus and I realize they've split, the two I saw at first flying not toward us but away, off on some other grim business, while we struggle against the threat that remains.  At least the fiery laser breath they burn down upon us from the sky melts fewer factories like spun sugar in rain - at least this year a million Meklar aren't melting with them - but apart from that, nothing seems to have changed.  The Sakkra transports still loom closer with each breath; the insignificant Meklar relief ships still crawl through the nebula, seeming not to move at all; the rest of the Endoria fleet sets out to follow - to follow them toward us - and the super ship Endoria built is with them now, obeying relocation orders, except it's smaller, divided into a few more helpless little fighters, equally slow and far off, while the Endorians instead of even bolstering their numbers, seem to forget about us and turn back to factory building and pointless token experiments into weapons technology.  It doesn't matter:  There's no use no matter what they do.  Nothing new can reach us in time, and neither can the old:  The ships that are coming to die in our cause crawl forward as if they're flying through purple gelatin.




I dream for once of a cheerful robot student studying lensing effects and oscillations, its diodes blinking happily.  A cyllinder rolls by with a nose-cone and rocket fuel spilling out of its insides, but the student doesn't seem to see, and swings a testbed laser down from the ceiling of its lab and watches merrily as it lases, igniting the trail of fuel, making sudden flames.  I vaguely see the robot closing a vise over the laser, hauling hard on the lever to squeeze it down to something smaller it can hold - but only vaguely:  The laser beam becomes the vast and terrible beam I know, cutting through our factories, the flames the burning of its foundations and energy cells against the sky.  I can see Meklon and Endoria as though they're close - so close - and see them working on more lasers that perhaps Primodians like me could use to defend ourselves when the Sakkra come at last, but working on them slowly, casually, as if there's no urgency, as if the little chance of success is unimportant, so much less important than it feels to me!  Instead our oblivious friends seem fascinated by an old computer project from so long ago I've half-forgotten what it is, more than half of them concentrating on that while none work any longer on factories or even building another supership like the steamy, humid planet is still trying to make ... and we keep turning out new Meklar bodies, waking, standing, ready to face the Sakkra, ready to die.




Another dream, and the screaming is everywhere - first as factories burn around me, the fiery heavy laser beams doing as much damage in a breath as they destroyed combined across both of the past two ... nights?  Dreams?  Years?  I can't tell for all the screaming, because the Sakkra have arrived, and their cries blend with the scraping screech of metal upon metal as our bodies fail us and fall apart, blasted to pieces by mortar shells and rocket fire, shorting out as lightning strikes among us from above, snapping under pelting hailstones, as though the very world we inhabit hates us as much as the Sakkra themselves.  We fight, struggling onward, wading through the storm that only harms us, never the onrushing enemy, the thunderbolts and hail receding from them as they come so as to kill and hinder us alone, and the Sakkra lick sharp teeth with long, pink protruding tongues, and slaughter us as we move in slow motion, caught by the cold that touches only us or the nature of the dream.  When all is over, Sakkra corpses litter the ground, far outnumbered by our own shattered mechanical bodies, and we who, half-broken, sparking, joints misaligned, every chassis pitted and battered and charred, stumble alive - for now - out of the wreckage are outnumbered by those of our people who if not for the storm or the dream would never have died.  We few survive for now, but Sakkra Hydra and Colony Ship cruisers still loom across the sky, calling to their worlds for more killers to come in - and all the while, the rest of our people, oblivious, seem to do nothing.




Still the people of Endoria continue to flit, as if distracted, after wild new possibilities.  While a few keep squeezing down lasers ever-so-slightly closer to portable size and slightly more press on with the old computer designs, many more hurry after some new, untested force field idea as though intoxicated by erratic data inputs to their feeds - with Meklon again and Humidity still in the shape of gigantic spaceyards for building impossible ships, doing nothing else, as if with no other purpose, in between.  I can even see the scout that just arrived at home making a turn around Meklon and rushing right back out again, on down to Moro, where the single laser fighter that left Endoria with the Scout for Meklon also entered orbit simultaneously.  And the Scout that's stood on Moro in every dream where in my awareness turns and leaves - bound nowhere, for no reason:  Centauri, a world I half-remember as one we found and longed for and see within the dream as belonging to walking rocks, is known to us, long-scouted, so there's nothing for a scout to do but look at it again, stretching to do so with no better logic than a dream's.




My nightmare is recurring:  Sakkra swarming in their transports, bound to slay us all with tooth and claw, rifle and blade, shell and grenade.  They are barely fewer this time, and we are so few that all Primoidus45 seems an empty wasteland.  Nor are we even building any more as it feels we did before or in another reality:  The world is a shipyard now like Meklon and Humidity, and has been for what seems a year already - except the ships we're building seem to me before my eyes to melt and change:  Meklon's and Humidity's are clouds of laser fighters and transports, already setting out our way, as though that is what they always have been; our own work all the while is on something else, not quite so small and so as impossible for us ever to finish building as superships for other worlds would be.




I spin from neighbor to neighbor, trying to warn them of the danger, the transports growing ever-larger in the sky, but I can't speak, or they don't hear me, all of them oblivious, their optical sensors oriented only on their work as they uselessly build engines or laser components or tritanium bulkheads and hull plating.  Deep, chortling laughter rumbles through the cold air, and I shudder and bulky, furry traders wander through, huge bears shouldering aside Meklar who seem not to notice and just go on building.  The Bulrathi merchants go on laughing, "Let's celebrate!  Our trade is making profits finally!"  I try to warn them too, to beg them to use their might to hold off the overwhelming Sakkra numbers, but no sound emerges; like my fellow Meklar, they don't hear me.  I try to reach for them, for anyone, to get someone's attention and point it at the sky, and struggling, I wake again, still haunted by visions of the Sakkra soldiers in their scaly hordes swarming forward in their transports, coming for our lives, and I need a long time in the interstellar feed to remind myself of my peaceful, waking reality.




I dream again of ships that swarm the stars:  The same dream of Sakkra transports coming on relentlessly, now with endlessly more to lose as more and more ships seem to converge across the skies.  Nearly a hundred new fighters from the dream-Meklon and the world I somehow know as Humidity are rushing in to reach us and die under the fire of Hydra breath at the same time that the killing assault transports arrive to massacre us on the ground.  And all the while, the same scenes, the same nightmare on the ground of oblivious Meklar building a ship that will never be finished and will help no one - while on other worlds, Meklar turn their energies to still-more-fruitless studies of force field and computer dynamics, discussing the possibilities of personal laser weapons only casually, almost incidentally.  A lone fighter sent from Endoria - was it in this dream or another, the very first I knew? - flees in terror as well it might from the Hydra pair, but the Primodians around me work on at their pointless tasks - while another single fighter rockets out of Moro orbit and hurries toward us, as if eager not to miss the excitement when everyone else gets here.  What is there here for them, for anyone, but death?




A strange and fitful dream this time:  I hurry back and forth from ship to ship - the ship, one, never to be finished, is five now, small and bearing a laser cannon each - with the Hydra cruisers lurking overhead, too close, not firing, just there, and more than a hundred and sixty ships and transports of different kinds all closing in.  I have to finish them - all of them! - all in a hurry, in a race, so they'll be in time to die like all the rest, and the Meklar on all the other worlds are musing happily over the comms, right in my ears, about the possibility of learning some kind of waste reduction technology, still working on their force field and computer wastes of time, and chirpily suggesting that we might have little laser guns to fight with, maybe, maybe, with less than half of half of half a chance.  We build and build in a frenzy, shouting across the stars to other Meklar who can't hear and couldn't help if they did but need to defend themselves before it's too late - unless as I fear it's too late already! - and the five little laser fighters rise, lifting up off of the ground, taking slowly and then quickly to the skies, flying straight at the killer Hydra ships as over a hundred more helplessly-weak little fighters arrive, just ahead of all the transports from both sides.  I see the sunlight glinting off their little hulls, harsh and bright, and gasp for breath, and wake to the true world and the true sunrise.




The same dream again - always the same dream - and yet...

The Hydra cruisers close in as I remember from too many dreams before, opening their heavy laser maws to spit fire down upon us, but only once:  They scorch dry, open steppeland but not factories, and no one is killed, while all the fighters wait silent, hidden on the far side of our world - and then each Hydra closes in on them, racing closer to our colony, but firing from long range on the fighter fleet instead, and I see for the first time, for sure, that they have no short-range weapons, for if they had, they would have fired those on us again.  Our fighters close in, swift and sure, and suddenly I realize:  Where a little group of laser fighters, smaller after taking long-range fire, could do no lasting damage to a Hydra, the huge group we've gathered in a single fleet can tear away armored Hydra scales far more quickly - especially with half the enemy gone away!  Incredibly, the Hydra pair draws back away from them as though afraid, firing at long range again, destroying a few more of our little shining fighters - but we have so many!  Our ships close in again and a Hydra bursts into flames, its fiery breath consuming it from within!  The other Hydra, damaged, limps away, not even firing, and our pilots make their one mistake:  They gamble on the slim chance of destroying it too in time, and it fires back as they move in - but from close range this time - destroying nearly as many with one lucky burst of fire as both ships combined had killed before.  Almost - almost! - they win their gamble all the same, but fall barely short before the nearly-disintegrating remnant of the Hydra jumps away and is gone.  Almost, I want to cheer - but it still is the same dream, and those terrible assault transports, Sakkra clawing each other out of the way, licking their teeth, to be first to come out and slaughter us, are dropping out of the sky now, racing in to land and kill us all.




And yet ... and yet it is not so!  As I watch breathless, fresh from killing a Hydra and falling painfully short of making it two, our fighters wheel across the sky and bear down on the transports and the killers swarming within, and open fire with their little laser batteries, each assault transport flickering bright and blazing, then flaring out like a meteor in the sky!  Our own transports arrive, bolstering our numbers, strengthening us, crowding our once-populous world with our people once again, as the Sakkra invaders burn and perish before they can reach the ground - all of them, to the very last!  I want to celebrate, to cheer, to join the other Primodians, old and new, in a wild dance - but dreamlike, we are turning back with nearly all the other Meklar to build factories again:  Only at Meklon, and only some, continue doing research enough to keep their labs going strong.  Returning to our factories like all the rest - or almost all the rest - I wonder, and I look back to the skies ... where to my horror, a huge chunk of our protecting fighters are turning away, racing out toward the nebula and some other distant star.  They're escorting a single lonely transport for reasons that could make no sense outside the context of a dream, bound as it seems for Romulas, so far away through the purple haze that there's no telling when they will arrive, and never to return - for if they did, no matter for what, it would unquestionably be too late.




Another dream - or is it the same? - with someone looming huge above me, a mass of muscle, teeth, and claws, but somehow now it has fur and I know its name, his name, Durpp.  It roars at me, something about money - it wants me to give more and more away, claiming I'll get more later somehow, off in a future far away.  He towers over me, and I feel so small, and I run and hide from his demands and false promises, and find myself amid a sea of purple, out in a place I somehow know is called Endoria, with a line a million Meklar long waiting to board a transport - a single transport, for no reason I understand - bound for Romulas, echoing something inside my mind.  Did I have this dream before?  But wasn't it on a cold steppe world?  Nothing like the purple-shrouded temperate landscape here.  A little scout ship sits alongside the transport, its last pieces just assembled, refueled and ready, its pilot lounging in the seat, and then I'm the pilot, looking out at the purple sky, rising as the transport rises beside me, flying to known, defended enemy territory, and I know it's a dream - and knowing it, I wake.




I dream of a Scout ship - I remember this - from another dream?  But this is not the same:  This ship is older, old and rickety; it's flown a long, long way, all the way to Silicoid Centauri from Moro, a meaningless name.  I'm vaguely aware of fighters and transports and that other scout all on their way ... elsewhere ... but here, there are more Scouts, Silicoid ones hovering in orbit, turning from me, running away as I know I must run, soon - surely soon - but so far, somehow, no one is coming for me.  There are many Silicoids on this world now, slowly, slowly, while building factories, as though their workers' rocky bodies are truly made of stone.  I try to land my balky little ship, and I'm almost caught in a billow of toxic, corrosive smoke belched forth by one of their few factories, spewing waste unchecked all over the world, slowly eroding all hope of its habitability.  I can't land; I can only return to space, orbiting alone, defenseless, searching everywhere inside my little cockpit for something I can use as a weapon when the Silicoids inevitably try to kill me - searching...




...and I find another Meklar instead, popping up from under the seat, demonstrating laser weapons designed especially for me, showing how the only path to the future is with lightning guns:  Ionic weaponry.  Vaguely remembering, maybe from the waking world, maybe from the dream, I try to ask about rockets we knew we could learn about before, a way of fighting Sakkra and Silicoids with shields, but no sound comes out, and the cheerfully-flashing diodes of my one friend are receding with the rest of it, off into the distance, and I can't follow, stuck here until someone comes to me...




...and ... I guess they are?  I want to scream at them now too - at all the Meklar filing onto transports at Primodius and Humidity, and most of all at the Primodian fighter fleet:  Don't come here!  At least not all of you!  You're leaving our world defenseless!  I want to, but it does no good:  They just come on and on and on, not even coordinated, falling toward us stumblingly and slowly - so, so slowly....

I force my voice into a shout with all my strength, and hear it echoing from the walls of my rest chamber as I jolt from sleep, crying out to the empty room for them to stop!




Again, again, moving like blind things, as though their cameras and photocells all have been shut off, dream-Meklar move oblivious across their worlds, some building factories, some studying computer technology, hopeful that their work will soon be complete, but without any preparations to build anything that will make good use of it, nor yet the shields that field mechanics engineers are interested in.  I see construction specialists debating the best means to cut down on factory waste products as though it will make a difference to our survival as a people - while others still blithely make crude beginnings in the cripplingly-difficult field of planetology.  And all the while, no one is even starting to look into our real needs:  Defenses, if not for our planets then at least for our ships, and weapons capable of overcoming Sakkra shielding ... or the Silicoids', since it seems we're heating up our war with them whether they trouble us - and whether I like it - or not.




Meklon itself - can it be Meklon, so close to a nebula, so far from the rim? - is joining in the frenzy of transport launches, racing them off at some unknown range:  There's no way to tell for sure how soon - or if - they'll arrive, and all of them, maybe a third of the homeworld's population, are going all the same, with nothing I can do or say to stop them, in spite of everything!  I hurry back and forth between them, my fellow Meklar, climbing one by one into their transports, heading one by one for their doom, and I try to head them off and might as well be running in circles chanting hymns:  Nothing I say seems to make it through to them!

I can see our defensive fleet and the people whose labors we need to build more, falling, falling away, with no way to retrieve them, no way to rescue them if the Silicoids meet them with ships of war, no way to rescue us if the Sakkra do again.  I stretch to reach them, but I can't move, can't even follow them; they just keep receding, endlessly.

(To be continued....)

[SpaceOWL]

So... half the attackers left orbit?
MOO AI always does this strange things... which is actually necessary, because if it was "smarter" and with those huge bonuses, the game would be a total massacre against the human player.

So P45 is still holding, which is very good, keeps Sakkra away from the most important colonies and gives us time to prepare real defenses there.

Good thing the Bears are happy enough to offer trade, but I agree it's not a good time - those 30 BCs per turn were needed elsewhere.

I think I would have gone for Hyper-Vs before Ion, not that great but an improvement for bases... what was your reasoning there Ref?

And that's a very aggressive move, to go for BOTH Silicoid worlds in one move and cut supplies from the NW corner, I really like it! Hope it works!

[RefSteel]

Thanks for the comments, SpaceOWL!

So... half the attackers left orbit?
MOO AI always does this strange things... which is actually necessary, because if it was "smarter" and with those huge bonuses, the game would be a total massacre against the human player.

Yeah; if all four had stayed in place, I would have had to build more fighters (instead of putting Meklon on tech for a turn or two right after they departed) and I'd have lost significantly more of them. Trying to defend the place may still have been a mistake - I'll never know for sure - but leaving it completely defenseless when I went for those Silicoid worlds must be one! (Even leaving just one fighter in orbit would probably have been better, and 20/20 hindsight suggests some better moves than that....)

Good thing the Bears are happy enough to offer trade, but I agree it's not a good time - those 30 BCs per turn were needed elsewhere.

Very true, but I didn't actually even think that part through as I played: I'm sticking to our variant rule against accepting other races' offers (and against voting for any opponent in the Council) in spite of the dire circumstances!

I think I would have gone for Hyper-Vs before Ion, not that great but an improvement for bases... what was your reasoning there Ref?

I didn't feel I could afford the BCs to tech the rockets in time to matter. This might have been a mistake, but I was hoping to defend P45 with fighters in any case - it doesn't have the production to defend itself with bases.

I've played to 2370, and hope to post a report for those turns soonish (how "ish" depends on when I interrupt myself for 39B again) - they've been ... complicated. And (spoiler alert) they're likely to remain so. As mentioned, I know I've made some mistakes, and may have made others I'm not aware of yet. We'll see if I can hold on long enough to turn the game around anyway!

[RefSteel]

Also, while I was between turnsets in the B game, I played on in this one, and finally finished more of the report.

[EDIT: Annnnd ... trying to post it again in spite of the ongoing forum issues....]

Second Report from Beyond, part 1: 2360-2365

Continuing research into computer technology is still years away from a breakthrough, but there are benefits to be had along the way: Medically - and especially in the field of psychology - we're able to tap into previously-inaccessible information from our patients' minds and bodies thanks to improve neural interface circuitry being built into moder meklar cyberskeletons. Many Meklar have reported hauntingly-similar, oft-recurring dreams, and while we can guess at the phenomena that may result in an effect such as this, we never before were able to observe the dreams directly in a state of full waking and cognition. As any Meklar psychologist is aware, dreams are normally composed of disconnected images and impressions, lent narrative force and continuity retroactively by the dreamer's imagination and memory - but the images and impressions in these dreams are disturbing and peculiar not only in their nature, as so many dreams seem to be, but in their appearance of actual progressive continuity.




Here, in a dream-impression taken in 2361, what looks like a map of an alternate galaxy that recurs through many Meklar dreams shows the familiar movement of tiny ships and transport fleets, but mixed with a new element: Incursion and attack by a people that - like the living rocks often called "Silicoids" - does not exist in the true galaxy: This "Psilon" menace is frequently described by dreamers as an empire led by something called "Tachaon," whose people have six limbs each - perhaps a case of deep-seated fears about the distant Klackons given a new and still-more-alien form - and enormous brains. Here, these "Psilons" conduct an attack at a world tellingly identified as both "hostile" and "dead," where the dreamer pilots a helpless Scout, fleeing from a clearly-more-powerful fleet, including fighters apparently armored with duralloy already as well as a destroyer which like the fighters is tellingly named for the stars themselves. As expected, other dream images followed which do not seem to follow from this scene:




A research laboratory in which Meklar are demonstrating a new battle computer may connect to the pilot's regrets and longing, seeming to connect to the previous images only through the idea of battle - and perhaps of research, as it connects to the "Psilons" and their powerful brains. Notably however, the dreamer experienced apparent relief at the idea of robotic controls, such as many of us hope we will be able to research in the real world soon, while remaining dismissive of electronic counter-measures to missile attacks. We hypothesize that this relates to other memories from recurring dreams, in which the use of heavy lasers by Sakkra fleets renders the value of missile jamming irrelevant and uninteresting. So far, there is no indication that this departs from the usual pattern of dreams, and the pattern continues with the next image, in a setting again entirely unrelated to those that preceded it:




This dreamscape is obviously a version of the High Council in which holographic projections of galactic leaders meet to decide on a ruler for the galaxy - obviously a traumatic image for any Meklar, knowing all too well what "ruler" means. In this dream version however, the Klackons, Bulrathi, and Sakkra are joined not by Alkari and Darloks as in the real galaxy, but by races from other dream images that have been described over the years: The Silicoid rock people to which many Meklar refer when discussing their frightening dreams and four-armed Psilons like those in the subject's earlier dream images. In this dream Council, the Bulrathi appear to be nominated alongside those very Psilons to rule the galaxy, dividing the loyalties of much of the galaxy while the Sakkra and Meklar both abstain. The recurrence of Psilon and Silicoid threats - sometimes together, sometimes individually - is peculiar to these sequential-seeming dreams, which never seem to feature the Alkari or Darloks, nor other semi-mythical races like sophisticated Human apes or Mrrshan warrior kittens, but that circumstance would not be persuasive in itself: It is only one of the details that, taken all together, make these dreams difficult to explain on the basis of known principles of psychology.




Of course, as happens all too frequently with these recurring dreams, the sample from 2361 closed on a typical grim note: Another Sakkra attack fleet approaching. Like so many other dreams of the kind, this attack was associated with an attack vector between a Sakkra colony at a star called Maalor and a cold steppe world that dreamers always seem to call Primodius - perhaps somehow a reference to fears about the vulnerability of a very different world with an entirely different name in the real galaxy? - and the presence of a Hydra and Sakkra Colony Ship suggests a connection to earlier dreams in which other Meklar reported a last surviving Hydra fleeing in company with a whole Colony fleet, but the Spectre destroyer squadron, so far as I am aware, is new to this dream. Another common refrain of dreams like this, the planet left helpless while defenders fly obliviously away, is in full evidence here, coming with an impression of Meklar fleets still on their way to hopelessly distant stars whose names - Centauri and Romulas - seem to be regarded as important within the dream, but convey only uncertain meaning. In any case, this image seems to be the last of the dream before the subject woke. The peculiarity of this type of recurring dream however lies less in the contents as such however than in the progression they seem to follow: It is unsurprising that the dreams seem to imperfectly rehash others that have been popularly described across Meklar society, but there seems to be no precedent for the frequency and manner of the changes that occur in the annals of psychology, dream interpretation, or any other related field except, perhaps, for a small group of fringe scientists exploring certain special applications of quantum theory with respect to the comm net and what one researcher described as collective consciousness.




The sequencing is illustrated well by the subject from whose dream this image was taken in 2362: Rather than returning to settings, persons, and themes that had been common in previous years, this dream seemed to have taken place at a future imagined into a virtual timeline of the dream, when a Scout ship and transport actually arrived at the Silicoid Romulas system. Perhaps displaying anxiety about our own scouts' work or the alien Scouts - especially those belonging to the Alkari, who again fail to appear at all in the dream - the dreamer perceived a vast cloud of Silicoid Scoutcraft filling the planet's sky, accompanied by just a single armed laser fighter, from which the subject, as the pilot of the arriving Meklar Scout, had to retreat. The dreamer's state of agitation in response to this image however did not appear to center around personal danger or flight, but rather upon the color of the stars in the image background, presumably recollecting the color-shifting effect of nebular interference on visible light and the consequent supposition that the dream-Romulas system must not be affected by such interference. This is not remarkable in itself - though all the details differ, many other dreams have centered around similar themes - except that an analysis of details imaged in the 2361 study that never were publicized before this dream occurred indicates a Scout ship and single colony transport approaching a Silicoid colony identified as Romulas, in such a position that it might be expected to arrive within a year.




Stranger still, though the next image from the dream unsurprisingly shifts perspectives entirely to Endoria, where factories were being destroyed without a fight by elusive, ever-present, unseen enemies, subtle details still suggested images from the 2361 study, precisely as though the events had been real and advanced by a single year. The star identified in that study as Romulas" had a Silicoid fleet in orbit like the one that had chased away the Scout in the earlier image from the 2362 dream, but also a transport landing, like the one accompanying the Scout ship on its way to that world in an image from the 2361 study. Further analysis discovers a Meklar ship in orbit at Centauri and transports at the right distances from both of the two Silicoid worlds to suggest a year's advance - while a Sakkra fleet stood a year closer to Primodius than in the 2361 study - with another appearing to trail it slightly. And when the image shifted again, it was back to Romulas - but this time to the surface, where the dreamer joined a Meklar batallion pouring out of a transport, with soldiers dying all around on both sides. Two Silicoids under personal laser fire for every Meklar that were blown apart by slug-thrower rounds, but the Meklar were outnumbered overwhelmingly, and the dreamer seemed to turn and try to flee past the laser-scored hull of the transport - such scoring as might have been caused by a single ill-equiped spacefighter in a vain attempt to destroy the transport before it landed - before the dream-scene shifted again dramatically.




Again the focus is on Endoria, but now includes Romulas too as a sense of destination: The transport's presence was retained, undamaged this time, and multiplied manyfold, into transports enough to fit all the Silicoid soldiers seeen in the prior scene and more, but filling instead with Meklar. It can well be imagined what is troubling to the subject about this image, but to the researcher, the most troubling thing is the sheer consistency of background details, as though the transports and starships dreamed to be crossing the nebula and passing through space all around it were definite objects occupying specific points in dream-space and dream-time - and as though unpublicized details of a different subject's dream from 2361 retained this specificity into the 2362 dream. If that were somehow true, it might explain why the dreamer's distress was centered on the absence of Meklar ships en route from Meklon in spite of relocation indicators for where they would be were they to appear. Accepted contextless analysis would suggest that the seeming contradiction itself might be disturbing, but in light of other images from the dream, and others from the 2361 subject, a dream-universe might be imagined in which Sakkra attack fleets were on their way to Primodius while the Meklar failed to contest them, leaving a defenseless colony. This anomalous dream behavior, compelling though it sounds, might be explained in various ways due to the small number of images involved - but it would continue in later studies as well.




This instance, collected in 2364, centers around Psilon attacks in deep and lonely interstellar space, similar to the beginning of the 2361 study, but featuring larger Psilon fleets above more than one hostile world. The Psilon"Comet" fighters are a novelty, but the other Psilon designs will be familiar already. This type of imitative imagery is to be expected to an extent, but again the details defy ready psychological explanation: A Meklar fleet is visible just where a retreating Scout ship would be expected to be had the similar retreat from Psilon attackers from the 2361 study occurred in a real galaxy shaped like the one that appears in common in these dreams; more Meklar transports and ships are represented as though advanced by two years' travel toward their supposed destinations from the sequence recorded in 2362, and the same is true of the two Sakkra fleets observed in that same dream sequence, with one apparently arrived at Primodius orbit already, uncontested, at the same time that the lead Meklar transports and ships appear to have arrived at Centauri.




The next dream image seems to focus in on that arrival as well, and as in many Meklar nightmares, it again centers on violence on the surface of a world, and again a scene of Meklar defeat: Already so outnumbered that they must know they can't win, the better-equipped Meklar soldiers die much faster, inexplicably, as appears to be routine in dreams, apart from the one short-lived instance featuring tiny numbers in the 2362 sequence already observed. This scene might not appear significant in isolation, in spite of the curious connection to the previous image in the sequence, but its association with other images in other studies and dreams led researchers to a wild and improbable hypothesis about certain other dream-images that might appear in - and not before! - 2367. The notion that a collective dream's timing and nature could be predicted in advance without an effort at timely influence - if it could be accomplished or even attempted, since for instance if word of the prediction spread shortly before its predicted time, it might influence the population accidentally - should give some indication of the state of dream research at the time, as scientists began to move beyond bafflement to actual attempts at exploring previously-dismissed possibilities about the nature of certain dreams like these.




The theme of personal violence continued within the sequence with the following scene: A strange interaction between two peoples, only one of which exists in the real galaxy, who in all dreams like this have been perceived as violent enemies - not only to the Meklar but to one another - as viewed through the eyes not of a typical Meklar but of the GNN information droid. The Sakkra people, at war with both the Silicoids and Meklar, had according to the news feed sent ambassadors to each to hear possible offers of tribute or pleas for peace - but the dreamer witnessed a scene in the Silicoid throne room where the Sakkra ambassador leapt suddenly upon Geode, the rocky emperor, stabbing it repeatedly with a knife until the blade shattered, and then also breaking his claws and teeth on its rocky carapace before Silicoid Imperial Guards were able to drag him kicking and screaming off their puzzled but essentially-unharmed emperor and carry him away for execution. "Presumably," the dreamer said within the dream, in the information droid's well-regulated tones, "the ongoing war between these violent peoples will not end any time soon."




After an image of four-armed Tachaon, emperor of the Psilons, offering greetings that sounded less like either diplomatic overtures or the indecipherable language of dreams than like simple paranoid ravings, the dream sequence reverted to a sweeping view of a wide swath of the galaxy, highlighting the Psilon empire as if in the shape of a claw, reaching upward toward the Meklar. The same image, in a trick of perspective impossible outside of a dream, revealed the fleet - matching the position of the one from earlier in the sequence - still on its way to Primodius: A Titan cruiser never seen in any previous dream of which we have a record, and yet another Spectre destroyer.

Curiously, among the impressions concurrent with this dream image was the idea of an ongoing war between the two dream peoples that do not exist in the real galaxy: The Psilon research magnates and Silicoid rocks. This impression has received a great deal more attention over the years than it probably merits because of the increasingly idea that these dream sequences are somehow windows into an alternate and equally-real galaxy - simply because it is a too-frequently raised counter-argument to this idea, or indeed to any suggestion of connections and logical consistency between images and impressions from such dreams as these.




The galactic maps frequently visible in dream-images whose overall, specific, and detailed shapes appear always to be identical from one image or dream to the next, even years apart, also display the basis of the counter-argument around warlike relations Psilons and Silicoids: The immense gulf of space between the stars identified with each of these two peoples suggests that they could not possibly be in contact with one another, still less actively at war. Some proponents of the notion of a true alternate galaxy tried to dismiss this "war impression" as insignificant, possibly a mental error on the part of the dreamer being studied here, in spite of the way this necessarily undermined their own arguments, but even this stance was largely abandoned when the sense of this war was shown to persist across multiple dreams and dreamers through the years. An alternate explanation has since been suggested however: That the Psilons or Silicoids might once have established a colony much closer to the other than the present map of the galaxy shows, by taking advantage of Sakkra or Klackon fuel bases in the course of a temporary alliance with one of those peoples. The colony in question would subsequently have been conquered or destroyed by the other people, leading to war even as contact was broken - or might even have been taken or destroyed by a third party if Tachaon declared war for reasons associated with his personal paranoid delusions at the earliest opportunity. Thus far, no actual fighting between the two dream peoples has been seen by any recorded dreamer, but combat involving the Meklar has remained frequent, remaining a central theme of these dreams.




One case, from a dream recorded in 2365, achieved an unprecedented breakthrough: The dreamer seemed to pilot a "Photocell" destroyer rising from the surface of Primodius45, and though no battle occurred as such - the Sakkra death fleet was so overwhelmingly powerful, the dreamer's only thought was of retreat - the dream included a clear view of the ship's scanners, which provided unprecedented detail about the Sakkra fleet - and details consistent with a realistically-possible alternate galaxy. The Hydra cruisers were relics: Heavy laser ships that appeared to be built with what in the real galaxy would have been turn-of-the century technology. Since ships like them have been described by Meklar describing dreams like these since at least 2320, this would come as no surprise if their specifications were widely known and reported, living in the collective or individual subconsious mind - but this dream record represents the first time to our knowledge that Hydra specs were reported in any detail at all. Meanwhile, the Titan might be almost as old, though of a subtly different design, shieldless and with less-reliable computer targeting, but carrying more weaponry, while the Spectre destroyers indicate much more modern technology in their advanced shielding, but appear to aim their weapons by pointing them in random directions and praying. Even the Sakkra colony ships are armed - if a pair of nuclear missiles apiece an be counted as armament - according to the scanners, though they clearly weren't in earlier dreams - not an inconsistency if the design is imagined to have been updated in between. In any case, the fear reaction that the subject exhibited to in the course of the dream in response to incoming ships didn't stem from any of these - but from those the Photocell didn't get on scanners, from a different image entirely: The onrushing transports from Maalor that have been central figures in so many other dreams, overshadowed by their escorts: A couple more Spectre destroyers flanking a full squadron of cruisers of a new type never before reported in any dream. It was at this point that the dream record ends, as the subject jolted awake, screaming, as so many Meklar dreams of this kind have ended, recorded or not: Another stark reminder of the importance of our work to all our people's well-being - if indeed there proves to be anything we can do, even with the records we have made.

[RefSteel]

Okay, that seems to be fixed for now; part 1 edited into the post directly above, and so on to...

Second Report from Beyond, part 2: 2366-2370

In 2366, for the first time in the history of dream recording, we witnessed a dream in which a planet was actually conquered by an invading army. Meklar transports had arrived on Silicoid worlds in earlier dreams, always outnumbered overwhelmingly by the Silicoid rock people, and Meklar had escaped an invasion alive in other dreams, as at Primodius in our first sample dream from 2362, but here for the first time, Meklar forces outnumbered the Silicoids, and though the fighting was intense and terrible, they emerged victorious, in control of the Centauri colony. The feeling of failure and error didn't drop away entirely: A sense remained with the dreamer that the invading force and the major fighter fleet that supported it would have been better deployed at Primodius, still threatened and defenseless, and that the Silicoids' miserable levels of industrialization made the colony's capture premature. Be all of that as it might however, the invasion itself was a success, and the dream sequence continued with another scene which, though in some ways perhaps as terrifying as the bloody fields of Centauri where the fighting occurred in the dream, in others represented another small victory.




The towering figure of Kaxal, Queen of the Klackon Interstellar Hive, nearly filled the dreamer's field of view, at first rejecting any overtures of friendship, equality, or even interaction in advance, but a later image in the same sequence, returning to a nearly-identical scene, showed an alternate view of Kaxal, eyes glowing blue as if with pleasure, accepting a small trade agreement on her people's behalf. Even the obsession with her worlds' ecology and extreme isolationism that the dreamer seemed to associate with Kaxal at least must have been preferable to the paranoia and frank insanity with which Tachaon of the Psilons in other dreams was seen to focus all his people's efforts, so far as he could, on military. Moreover, the Darloks appeared to the dreamer to be actively fighting the Silicoids in a way the Psilons couldn't possibly be - an idea consistent not only with the map of Klackon and galactic territory that followed in the course of the dream, but with the galactic maps of prior dreamers as well - including one from two years previously.




The Klackons appeared to control some seven star systems within the dream galaxy - including the Kulthos system at the galactic rim which had belonged to the Silicoids in images dreamt in 2364. If the maps and dreams were imagined to be sequential, it would be extremely clear that the Silicoids were an immensely unpopular people, fighting wars on many fronts - and losing them. It is difficult to judge of this from the 2366 dream alone, but other evidence continued to mount suggesting a real temporal connection and sequence between dreams like these collected from separate subjects over the years. Another case can be seen in this dream image and many of the others across these studies: The Sakkra, always represented in the dreams as deadly, implacable, violent enemies, are shown with blue flags and livery - the color used by Alkari in the true galaxy - while red, the true Sakkra color, is associated with the Silicoids in all these dreams. Similarly, the Bulrathi - identified in many dream images as long-time neighbors and traders - use the violet colors that are actually claimed by the Darloks, who fail to appear at all in the dream galaxy, leaving the true Bulrathi colors, with yellow primary, for the Psilon people who of course have no place at all in the galaxy as we know it, with only the Klackons retaining their standard green. Some dream interpreters make much of the details here and their implications about the emotions caused by different peoples, but perhaps the most telling thing about them is their consistency. Among these consistent details in fact, as would later be seen, was the presence of Meklar fighter fleets en route from Meklon and Humidity to Primodius, timed on the basis of their apparent positions to arrive at the same time as the Sakkra transport fleet.




Of the two dream peoples of whom no real-life counterpart exists, the Silicoids appeared to be a weak and failing enemy, but the Psilons were in some respects the diametric opposite, in spite of Tachaon's obvious insanity. The dream sequence collected in 2366 ended with a clear example of this, representing a Psilon laboratory, with a four-armed scientist describing his people's ability to survive on barren planets in exchange for secret knowledge about deuterium fuel storage techniques. Had the dream included the actual means of accomplishing either of these things, it would have been fascinating to learn whether they would accomplish what they were supposed to achieve, since at present we have access to neither of the the technologies described, but the exchange was identified conceptually in the course of the dream rather than taking place in full. The emotions surrounding the exchange were complex: The dreamer was apparently convinced that the Psilons couldn't lack fuel technology beyond basic hydrogen for long, but still deeply concerned about what they might do with the extra range in the meantime, yet desperate enough for any advantage, no matter how small - any slight improvement in the rate at which Meklar workers could produce the things they needed - to be grateful for the opportunity. Such complicated and contradictory feelings toward the Psilons were echoed in nearly every other dream in which they appeared, but of course on its own, this proves nothing.




The first dream sequence collected in 2367 began in a state of agitation, mourning, and fear. The smaller laser fighter fleet - consistent in size with all previously-recorded dreams - was met in the Romulas system by a Silicoid fleet newly arriving from the direction of Cryslon. Both colony ships and all three Scouts fled the scene, but a pair of armed Shark cruisers advanced threateningly on the little Meklar fleet. The dreamer's mental state evolved with the appearance of missile launches from the Sharks, as the fighters avoided all of them successfully before closing with the Sharks themselves and taking fire from multiple laser batteries. The fighters took severe damage, losing nearly half their number in the course of the battle, but by the time the scene shifted, both Sharks had been carved to pieces by laser fire, and the shift was to the surface of Romulas - almost as pitifully under-industrialized as Centauri had been - where a huge Meklar invasion force was just landing under overwatch from the the surviving fighter fleet.




The dream-images surrounding the battle were as grim and as painful as ground war images in other dreams, but just as at Centauri in the previous year's dream, this one ended in a kind of victory, with Meklar forces in control of the planet and ready to improve the execrable state of the planet's development. For a brief and shining moment, the dreamer experienced triumph in place of the fear and anxiety that had characterized the early moments of the dream.

It was short-lived. The next dream-image was of a diplomatic holo-chamber, where the dreamer tried to persuade Kryssta, the Sakkra emperor, that the damage wrought by the Meklar fleet and invasions against their mutual enemies suggested a path to peace. When Kryssta refused without explanation or excuse, the triumph of Romulas all but disappeared - especially when overtures to the Silicoids themselves, offering a way out of one at least of the losing fronts of their universal-seeming war, were rejected just as soundly. It was on this note - of oppressive war poised to continue indefinitely - that the dream ended and the subject woke from sleep.




Until 2368, we had assumed that dreams about walls closing in on the subject were unrelated to the dreams that appeared to take place in another galaxy, but when a Bulrathi fleet arrived at Ajax during the same 2368 dream in which Sakkra assault troopers invaded Primodius45 again, some of the researchers reported receiving that impression themselves. The Bulrathi colony ship that ultimately formed their Ajax colony was armed, and the dreamer, dreaming of piloting only an unarmed Scout, might have been forced to retreat from it even had it arrived alone, and with a squadron of Hunter heavy laser destroyers to escort it, there was nothing a lone Scout could do. In subsequent dream-images, Ajax had indeed been added to the Bulrathi empire, which like the Psilons' seemed to reach out to take hold of the Meklar like a claw, only extending from a different direction, spread wider, as if poised to take all the Meklar immediately. This impression was not however carried out: It was the Sakkra, as in so many other dreams, who struck to devastating effect.




The fleet gathered at Primodius was perhaps adequate to handle a Hydra, a Titan, a colony ship, and a small number of Spectres. Had the newer Juggernaut cruisers been armed with missiles in place of some of their heavy lasers and shielding as the Silicoid Sharks had been in another dream, there might even have been a chance to overcome the entire enemy fleet - but it was not to be. The Photocell's scanners again revealed the full details of the ships the Meklar were facing, and all those that had appeared in an earlier dream were identical in every detail, but the Juggernauts' armament and defenses - their electronic counter-measures would even have helped to protect them against a missile base had one been present, but since first of all one wasn't and second of all it wouldn't have helped enough, its presence actually was the one point of relief for the Meklar in the dream - instead made it the biggest threat to Meklar defenses that had as yet appeared in any known dream. The very fact that enough detail was available and consistent both in appearance and presentation both with itself and with our understanding of our own reality to make statements like these provides strong support for hypotheses that dreams like this are non-random, though they don't necessarily hint at what, if anything, such dreams mean - except that the dream-Meklar seem to be in enormous danger.




Like those first described way back in 2352, this dream of a Sakkra invasion did end with the survival of the defending Meklar, but with terrible catastrophes befalling them along the way quite apart from the invasion itself. Though outnumbered slightly on the ground, the Primodians fought from prepared positions with superior technology - and yet they very nearly perished to the last defending Meklar in the face of bloodthirsty Sakkra, random malfunctions, and driving sleet that seemed to strike everywhere except among the Sakkra ranks. The dream ended not with the battle, but during its aftermath, as the dreamer was apparently making an ineffectual attempt to reassemble one of the few other survivors at risk of crumbling to pieces.




The first dream we recorded in 2369 began with a peaceful, even hopeful moment in a small laboratory, where new defensive shields were demonstrated, and scientists spoke encouragingly about researching miniaturized versions to help protect Meklar colonists from future invaders. That future was understood to be distant though, and in similar dreams recorded from other subjects, there was even a certain degree of uncertainty - or even of regret - for failing to pursue a different kind of force field research instead: This seemed to come with a feeling that better deflector shielding would - in an even more distant future - have rendered defensive bases completely immune to the weapons aboard the known Sakkra fleet, while the personal shields being contemplated instead would only help reduce casualties once an invasion began - no doubt from horrific to merely very costly. The shields already being tested in the dream were expected to help a great deal to let planetary bases resist the Sakkra fleet as well, but in dreaming as in waking, there is a world of difference between resistance and immunity.




In another echo of much-earlier dreams, many dream records from 2369 include scenes of boarding transports in settings that identify them as launching from the windswept surface of the Primodius colony, with Centauri as the apparent destination. Centauri is understood to belong to the Meklar in the 2369 dreams though, and the feeling of the dreams as the transports set out is of flight and emptiness: Of unworked factories left behind - of evacuation and retreat. Some dream images seemed to be looking back from transport ramps at abandoned, desolate steppelands, with few Meklar left alive to board the transports or support their launch, always with Kryssta's massive death fleet hanging in orbit overhead and the next wave of assault transports already looming in the distance, incoming in unknown numbers, with another Spectre destroyer for an escort. Other threats are perceived to be gathering as well, from Psilons passing through Meklar space seeking to claim yet more new worlds the Meklar need to Silicoids lurking out beyond scanner range, their colony ships and scouts from the battle for Romulas still crawling back toward Cryslon through the nebula but no sign as yet of what else they might be plotting. Other alien transports were perceived as well in the course of the dream: Bulrathi and Psilons apparently converging on the Psilon Ryoun star system. What meaning these impressions might have in the dreamers' psyches could not be known, but a growing proportion of dream analysis discussion was questioning whether that was even the right question: If shared and sequential dreams could actually be shown to track with a consistent narrative or even a consistent if virtual reality, many were already beginning to ask if we might be better served by addressing them as though they represented a window into the alternate galaxy they seemed to reveal - no matter how improbably and even inexplicably.




By 2370, dream researchers were actually beginning to refer to the "discovery" of Morrig, a neutron star whose lone and fiery world carried dreamers to soaring heights of hopeful emotion - perhaps, some imagined, applying the rules of our own galaxy to the seeming-galaxy of the dreams, because the conquests of Romulas and Centauri would have cut off the Silicoids from that valuable star before they could get their rocky appendages on its world's riches. Whether originating in the dreams themselves or in the collective subconscious - or even the collective conscious itself as Meklar exchanged stories of what they had dreamt - of the real Meklar people, the dreams of what some were grimly beginning to call the Primodian Galaxy certainly had the shape of real events in a different setting with different populations, and they - or their nominal settings - were becoming a major and separate area of study. The Psilon colony ship that retreated from the toxic riches of the Darrian system was merely another case in point: Every dream that featured it showed it firing a pair of missiles at the local Meklar scout ship, which fled from them without leaving the system, successfully evaded their flight paths as their fuel ran out, and retained control of the system as the Psilons departed, as unharmed as the scout itself.




Many dreamed of a GNN reporter very much like our own as well, conveying news not about our galaxy, but about the dream-galaxy's peoples. The still-distant Klackons were not perceived as warlike enemies by any of the dreamers we recorded, unless it was in a way our instruments could not detect, but the threat of Sakkra military might was well known to anyone familiar with that dream galaxy already - as, in a subtler and more peripheral way, were those of the Bulrathi and Psilons. The biggest surprise, perhaps, was the report's insistence that Meklar fighters already outclassed the entire Silicoid starfleet - which, had the galaxy been real and rock people an actual possibility, might have suggested grave danger for the Silicoids, who appeared to be at war with their entire galaxy. The very existence of the Meklar people seemed to be endangered in these dreams - and yet it was not clear, and is not, whether they were indeed the most at risk among the Primodian peoples ... or whether they would have been, had that galaxy indeed been real.




The evacuation of Primodius was again a major theme of these dreams, as it had been in the previous year, but the events were not the same: The number of Primodians had dwindled, exactly as it might with a real multi-year evacuation, ever more of its factories falling silent, its streets ever more empty, with the Sakkra still closing in. Across the dream-galaxy, ships and transports made progress exactly as though they had been real, including Meklar ships sent en masse toward the front and apparently in some cases singly as well, on lonely probing expeditions to gather information on threats from Sakkra and Silicoid fleets. The fleet that had failed to save Primodius arrived in comparative safety in the Moro system, and held there, awaiting developments, ready to respond to any Sakkra fleet movement - except, as some dreamers felt with regret toward the Humidity colony. They couldn't be everywhere at once, in spite of inhabiting - or, as many now argue, because in truth they were more than - the merest dream.

I have no idea if it's possible to win from this position ... but I'm going to keep trying! (In fact, I've played beyond this point now ... but that sentence is still entirely true!)

[SpaceOWL]

Very challenging position Ref.
Bulrathi / Klackon / Psilon empires are already big and will become very strong after developing for some years.
The other two will likely push towards Meklar territory as they are squeezed by the big ones.

OTOH Meklar with 5 respectable-sized colonies have chances if you can defend. More so if you make it to the hostile planets in the corner.

Do I see a Bulrathi troops going to Psilon's Ryoun? That should be good news.
What's going on in other tech fields (especially Weapons)?
Do you mind to share the save?

[RefSteel]

I dunno. We're really far behind in development and technology. We'll keep holding on as long as we can, but it's not going to be quick or easy. (Well, it might be quick if another AI decides to attack us! We're struggling against the losers of the galaxy!) As you said, if we can defend, we've got a chance just by holding on - but there's a long road ahead!

What's going on in other tech fields (especially Weapons)?

Basically nothing. Like I said, we're way behind. I couldn't even find the RPs to start trickling research into more than one or two fields!

Do you mind to share the save?

I'd be glad to! Give me a couple of days to play and report my Game B turns and finish my report for this one to bring it up to date, and I'll upload my now-current save for 2380. (If you want the 2370 one too, let me know; I think I still have the annual autosaves for the "set" I just played.)

[RefSteel]

And to bring my reporting up to date with where I've played so far, here's my report for 2370-80:

Consider the dream galaxy first as a galaxy, for that is the way it behaves over the course of many dreams:  As though it were indeed a place of its own, and one in which our people are suffering mightily.  Consider it not as a fear to haunt our rest periods, but as another front in our battle against oppression, even if only by our own dreams.  If, as suggested by the maverick research of S_T-101, these dreams represent quantum bleed-over effects from an alternate universe, then perhaps we may affect that universe in turn - and if they are only dreams as psychologists long understood them, complex subconcious responses to various stimuli and memories, affected and rendered into a lifelike pattern by our interactions with the interstellar comm network, then let us use those same interactions to take control of our destiny - even one that exists only in and through our dreams!  The more we learn of these shared nightmares, the more we - perhaps - can change them into something else, something more.  If we cannot triumph, at least we can show that we will not be slaves even to our subconscious minds, and if we fail, then we will fail in our own - our chosen - way!




Our efforts seem to have begun well here in 2371, as the simple waste scrubbers our factories lacked in previous dreams have finally begun to pop up all across our dream industries, following their laboratory in-dream "discovery," and the revelation that duralloy armor would be achievable as well if only our dream-selves can survive to see it produced.

Unfortunately, that is far from a certainty.  Though the Silicoids are at war with nearly every other race in the galaxy, and have been losing worlds steadily on all sides, and though what exists of their starfleet, reportedly the weakest in the dream-galaxy, may be desperately needed to defend what they have left, they have decided instead to send much of their little remaining starforce to attack the Centauri colony.




It won't be enough to overcome the dream-Meklar defensive starfleet there - left in the system in case of exactly such an attack - but it will still have an effect; after decades of continuous setbacks, our dream-counterparts can't afford wars of attrition like this, and still lack the resources to defend without significant losses.  Indeed, the evacuation of Primodius45 is about to complete, sending off the last million who can board transports in time - ironically leaving for the soon-to-be-embattled Centauri colony, where they'll be risking their lives again on another endangered world.  At Primodius itself, the Sakkra transports are expected to arrive by early next year.  When they do, our danger will only increase, as with our dream selves' lightning-rod colony transformed into a Sakkra salient into our space, we'll have to defend a much-wider front, and react wich even less warning to the deadly Sakkra fleet.




The transports arrived, very much as expected, and - also much as expected - conquered the evacuated colony with ease.  Morale must have been low (or it's just the standard circumstance of appearing to have execrable luck in these dreams) because with hand lasers and defensive fortifications in place, the defending dream-Meklar should at least have been able to take three transport-loads of the invaders with them - but in fact they got none, allowing the Sakkra to overrun them like invincible superbeings.  It hardly matters in this instance, though the impact was immense in previous Primodian ground battles:  Then, we were expecting to win handily, and for our survivors to contribute to the colony's future defense.  Had the fights gone the other way, our dream selves might well have fought longer for this world and even held it now instead of evacuating over the past few years, but since the lizards won - and since they are lizards - their fecund breeders would easily have laid enough eggs in short order to replace any losses we could have inflicted anyway.

The only question now - or the one that matters most at least - is which direction the Sakkra will go next.




In a different alternate universe, where our counterparts weren't under constant attack and had time to do the research they wanted to, the desert world Aquilae Prime, discovered way out at the corner of the galaxy in 2373, would be a promising potential future Meklar world.  In the dreamworld we know, it's jus a tease for now, too far out to be colonized without a major investment in new technology - to say nothing of the ship itself - and at risk of eventually falling to the Klackons instead.  Other scouting expeditions revealed the Sakkra defenses at Maalor and the Klackon fleet protecting the terran world of Phantos 3, right at the heart of Silicoid space.  The Phantos colony had been under Silicoid control when the scouting expedition set out, but - like several other ex-Silicoid worlds in recent years - had been conquered in the interim.  Not wanting to wind up with yet another implacable enemy, we have no plans to conquer Phantos from the Klackons anytime soon, and the Silicoids certainly won't get it back if they keep sending their only military forces to dream-Meklar worlds and ignoring all the other threats and opportunities they're facing.

We, through the dream-Meklar themselves, are trying to react a little more creatively.




The main part - the scary part - of the Meklar fleet that took Primodius45 is moving forward toward Moro even as the two little fighters produced at P45 itself continue en route in their retreat toward Humidity090 - but with the Juggernauts departing - and perhaps a too-reckless willingness to risk their returning too soon - Humidity and Meklon both are sending huge waves of transports to reclaim our recently-lost world, with the remnants of the Romulas defense fleet scheduled to arrive at the same time and the fleet previously holding station at Moro - with no hope of defeating those Juggernauts on its own - preparing to fly over too.  This is an immense gamble, and perhaps one we or the dream Meklar can't afford to take - but unless we take the risk - or take some risks at least - it feels inevitable that the our dream counterparts will be slowly beaten down and exterminated from their galaxy.




As expected, our dream-selves' Centauri starforce was able to defeat the Silicoids' Mako cruiser when it arrived in 2374, in spite of its ion cannons, most of them with heavy mounts.  The Silicoid colony ships, still unarmed, joined the others from Romulas in retreat, all crawling slowly through hyperspace back toward their homeworld, while we took stock of our losses:  Nine little fighters might not seem like much, but it represents a full sixth of our local defensive forces.  Even "winning" the fight as they appeared to have done - nine such fighters are far easier to replace than an entire battle cruiser - means steadily losing the war of attrition against the more-advanced peoples who held a much greater fraction of the galaxy.  Our dream selves are playing catch-up, trying to industrialize and get at least some research done, even knowing as we do that others are leaving them far behind, but juggling those priorities against the immediate needs of defense is never going to be easy.




Meanwhile, of course, the non-Silicoids keep trying to encroach on worlds our dream counterparts can't claim for lack of the necessary technology.  The five Dagger fighters detected en route from Phantos to Celtsi and its tiny toxic world last year - their course not apparent until recently - would not represent much of a threat on their own, but still serve as a reminder of just how wide a front the dream-Meklar would have to guard in order to expand peacefully.  And meanwhile, in space our dream-selves might at least reasonably call their - our - own, our transports are still making their way through space, slow as sludge, the Primodius evacuees still on the last leg of their journey to Centauri while the new wave of hopeful Primodians-to-be ate already beginning to converge on the star from two directions, both still - for now - out of view.  The Sakkra colony ship in their Moro fleet has already disassembled itself on the dead world in the system, establishing a new fuel base and colony for them - which leaves us to hope and wonder what the next move will be for the rest of that killer fleet.




The parallels between our galaxy and the dream galaxy even extend to Council timing:  There as here, the year 2375 brings an election - by some definition of the word - to select a new High Master for the galaxy.  Of course the results are inconclusive:  Apart from Durpp and Tachaon themselves, the leaders of the most-populous peoples in the galaxy, only Geode of the Silicoids bothered to cast a vote - and only because the Bulrathi are the only ones in the galaxy with whom it is not at war ... for the moment anyway.

That's all for the High Council; other dream scenes will tell us if our impetuous attempt at counter-invading Primodius45 was a grave mistake.




The answer, of course, is yes ... but by sheer good fortune and dream-Sakkra stupidity, it's a mistake for which we apparently won't have to pay.  The Juggernauts and Spectres indeed departed Moro last year, in time to interdict our fleets and transports already en route to their target - but in the wrong direction, bound for Maalor, at the same time as the ships the had stationed at Primodius itself, vulnerable as they were to our approaching fleet.  That's tremendous news, as Primodius - as we know only too well - lacks the production capacity to built itself a meaningful defense in the year that remains before the counter-invasion hits.  If the attack was nevertheless ill-advised, at least it looks like the way is cleared for it to work!




The first dreams of 2376 offer vision on the latest dream-Sakkra warship design - at least the one we've most-recently seen - in the Banshee destroyer, three of which have been built to defend Primodius from our dream-selves' fleet.  Needless to say, these unshielded twin-gatling-laser boats are completely inadequate to the task in numbers as small as these, but they're an order of manitude more dangerous to our fighters than the old Spectre destroyers in spite of the latter's advanced shielding.  In this instance, of course, the Banshees merely retreat, leaving the way clear for the counter-invasion.




In early dreams, before our recording techniques were honed, many Meklar reported a feeling that Primodius45 itself was inimical, seeming almost to battle against them in concert with the Sakkra invaders - so it was heartening, for once, to get the feeling that the place perhaps has no bias against Meklar - it just doesn't like people living on it, or really likes invasions!  This time, the chill winds of war blowing across the planet's surface seemed to menace the Sakkra poachers as much as they had done to our own dream-forces in the past, and we suffered less than fifty percent casualties in spite of outnumbering them by barely more than eight to five.  Better still, though the Sakkra had only assembled a few extra factories since the dream-Meklar last held the planet, after failing to steal hand laser designs in their invasion as we feared they might, they were sloppy enough about their own technological secrets, perhaps over-confident in their ability to hold the planet, that our dream counterparts were able to capture a partially-completed Banshee destroyer in the shipyard before it could be destroyed, with some of its critical systems intact!  It might well have been expected, between the successful invasions here, at Romulas, and at Centauri, that our dream-selves might be able to reverse engineer something from their enemies, but it looks like the counter-invasion's luck is holding out:  They managed to get two!




...or maybe the luck isn't turning quite the way I thought.  Of course it was only the skeleton of a Banshee destroyer, with a number of systems installed that we could duplicate already for ourselves apart from what we got - the Sakkra hydrogen fuel cells and gatling laser array - so we couldn't have expected much, and the fact that we claimed both speaks well for our reverse-engineers' ability, or for our dream-selves' insofar as there's a distinction there that means anything.  All the same, the fuel cells are obsolete on arrival, long since superseded by our dream-selves' own deuterium, and gatling lasers won't help us against Juggernaut cruisers in any meaningful way, making these two semi-worthless examples of Sakkra technology the two worst - by far - of what is frankly an otherwise-spectacular lot.




Now, granted, these dream-Sakkra haven't done much in most fields of scientific research - with that reverse-engineering job, we're now their equals or strictly their betters in the majority of the available fields of technology - but what wouldn't we do for anything and everything they've researched in the two remaining fields?  Even in our own specialty of computer science, they're two generations ahead of our dream-counterparts - and fully four in their own specialty field of planetology!  The closest thing to a dud that's still remaining is the cheap ECM jammer they must have devised long since; everything else would have been not only a step up but a windfall of galaxy-shaking proportions.  They have robotic controls similar to what our dream-selves are slowly researching already, improved space scanners that would increase our-their security immeasurably, terraforming and soil enrichment to strengthen and enlarge all our dream-colonies, environmental controls that would finally make available nearly every planet in the dream-galaxy, and ecological restoration techniques so advanced that even with the colonies' limited industrial infrastructure would vastly increase productivity all across Dream-Meklar space.  If only it were possible to invade another Sakkra world and claim some of these...

...but of course in order to do so, our dream-counterparts would have to be strong enough to do it, or at least to try, which might require enough advances to render some of these moot as well.




Meanwhile, thanks to their new-formed Moro colony, the Sakkra still have a salient in dream-Meklar space even after the reconquest of Primodius45 - and a large group of transports are on their way already to build up its strength.  Unlike some of the previous transport groups however, these are unguarded, and there is nothing important that Moro can do before they arrive.  We can't set up an invasion of Moro as we did at Primodius itself - our dream-scientists are still struggling to learn to survive on dead worlds like Moro 4 - but we can do something about them, and I intend to try.

Of course this would be much more difficult if we had to fight on two fronts at once.  Fortunately, the last of our evacuation transports is about to reach Centauri, and the only visible Silicoid fleet is the pair of retreating colony ships bound for their homeworld from Centauri.  If this changes next year or any other time remotely soon - either through further Silicoid action or the intervention of one of the true powers in the galaxy ... we'll just have to weather the storm as best we can.  It's all we can do.




(Historical note:  Often in the past, the random-seeming or frankly-idiotic actions of other peoples have provoked comment from Meklar observing these dreams, particularly in sending fleets away from embattled worlds at critical times.  This composite dream image perhaps explains some of these actions, while demonstrating that such airheaded activities are not restricted to the non-Meklar peoples.  What Meklar leadership thought they were accomplishing by sending eight fighters away from Centauri - a significant fraction of its surviving defensive fleet, with no reinforcements coming at a still-slowly-developing colony - is difficult to discern.  They didn't even know if the fighters would be in time to intercept the Klackon colony ship bound for their destination, should have realized the force was inadequate to deal with five Dagger fighters already known to be far more maneuverable than them, and didn't know how the Klackon colony ships were designed and armed, but that wasn't the worst of it.  The year before, the Silicoid fleet en route between Centauri and Meklon had been a pair of retreating colony ships, as noted in contemporary reports - and apparently when those colony ships disappeared off of tracking, flying out of range, and the attack fleet on its way up from Cryslon swept in toward Centauri to take its place, the Meklar strategists either didn't check on what was there, or didn't notice it at all, or somehow didn't care.)




With their real fleets soaring majestically away through hyperspace, the Sakkra had only three Banshee destroyers ready at Moro to face the main dream-Meklar battle fleet in 2388.  Even that hopelessly out-of-date collection of fighters with a scanning destroyer for a flagship was more than enough to chase the tiny defending fleet away and surgically remove the colony from the surface of Moro 4 by waiting for the short-duration shields' power to run out and then basically just lasering it a lot from space.  Being Sakkra, the Sakkra will hardly miss the three million lizards who inhabited the planet, and even the dozens of transports heading there with a million Sakkra apiece that will now crash and burn on arrival with no surviving landing system on the surface will spawn quickly enough from their seas of eggs, but destroying the fuel base there while our dream-selves control Primodius45 means the Sakkra can't launch any new attacks deep into our space; they have to content themselves with the ones that are en route to Moro already - or that no doubt will be soon - again - to stars like Primodius.




Our current starfleet in the dream galaxy might be able to take the pictured fleet, and certainly could if supplemented by more fighters, but not without enormous cost - and it's the second of two Sakkra fleets on their way up there.  The colony ships with each fleet mean our reprieve from back-lines Sakkra attacks may well be short-lived, and we're really feeling the dream-Meklars' lack of any kind of engine ... or indeed basically any other kind of technology:  A lack that is felt all the more strongly at Centauri, where we've finally belatedly recognized the dangerous incoming Silicoid fleet.  In spite of our efforts to build up that world, we just haven't had enough time, and the eight laser fighters we sent away in a fit of ... ah, overambitiousness ... will be sorely missed.  We're trying to build more ships there now - no chance of finishing a missile base in time even if it would be of any use - but it may be too little too late.




The Silicoid attack has reached Centauri, with 2380 barely begun, and as we feared, it's too much for our defensive fleet.  Their colony ships are still armed with pretty rock sculptures and crystal wind chimes, thankfully, so both of them retreated immediately, but their weirdly-sphere-headed Mako cruisers are a different matter entirely.  Even maneuvering well enough to trick them into wasting some of their short-range ion fire on the planet itself, barely leaving a mark the surface when they did, our dream-selves' fighters were only able to take out one of the Makos before, down to less than half of their own initial strength, the fighters wisely beat a hasty retreat.  We can only hope the planet can build enough fighters to repel the remaining Mako and deal with the now-surely-incoming transports in time.




Like the Sakkra when they first attacked Primodius45, the Silicoids aren't confident in their ability to conquer Centauri, so they're taking the low road, hitting the planet from orbit to soften it up - and to try to make sure that if they can't use the industrial infrastructure we've built up so dilligently, neither can we.  A million of our people died in the bombing, together with five of our factories, and of course it would have been much worse if we'd let the other Mako survive to preserve our fleet.  We've been trying to get out of this two-front war for decades now with no luck, and we can't seem to even stabilize on either front - but we're fighting on anyway, as best we can manage!  Now that we know how to affect them, we won't give up ... our dreams!

...and, as SpaceOWL requested, a link to the save!

[RefSteel]

Just as a note: I haven't yet played a single turn since the save I posted; I got caught up in rolling and play-testing maps for the upcoming EitB game, and that's been taking up all my gaming time. I do plan to play this one out to a conclusion when I can though - whatever that conclusion may be!

[haphazard1]

Hi, RefSteel! Thanks for letting us know what is happening. I am curious to see if you can play that one out to a victory.

I am curious about the upcoming EitB game, and will have to watch that one once it gets going.